Corey Robin's Blog, page 55

What We Owe the Students at Princeton

On Wednesday, students at Princeton University occupied the president’s office. They had a list of demands regarding the status of students of color at Princeton. One of them was that Princeton remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from all campus buildings and programs because of Wilson’s enthusiasm, expressed in word and deed, for white supremacy.

Having been an undergraduate at Princeton in the late 1980s, I knew this demand would generate a lot of heat. Unlike John C. Calhoun, whose name adorns one of Yale’s residential colleges, Wilson is Princeton. He was an undergraduate there, a professor there, and the university’s president. It was from Princeton that he launched his national political career, first as governor of New Jersey, then as president of the United States. I thought to myself: no matter what your position is on the politics of naming, campus protests, discussions around race today, this is going to be interesting.

On Thursday, after a 32-hour standoff, the students’ occupation ended with, among other things, Princeton committing to opening a dialogue about possibly removing Wilson’s name from some parts of the campus. While the agreement brought the occupation to an end, I suspect the controversy has only just begun. Yale can easily get rid of Calhoun; his name was only attached to Calhoun College in 1932. Wilson is different: in part because of his national stature, in part because of his embeddedness at Princeton, in part because Princeton is, in some ways, still a Southern university.

Wilson’s past is Princeton’s present. Not just in terms of race—one need only eat at the university’s Prospect House, where many of the servers are black, to get a sense of just how many buttons are now being pushed—but in terms of how Princeton conceives itself politically. Princeton’s motto, “In the Nation’s Service,” originated with Wilson, and is fundamental to Princeton’s sense of itself as a training ground for the country’s ruling class, particularly in government. There’s simply no way Princeton can extricate itself from its entanglements with race without revisiting its entanglement with national power. Not just domestically but also internationally: Wilson did not leave his race politics behind when he headed for Versailles; they went there with him. Likewise American power and its Princeton servants.

How far Princeton is willing to bend on this issue, in other words, will tell us something about the outer boundaries of a leading university’s willingness to confront its racial past.

I dedicated my Salon column to the controversy and its resolution. I focused less on these issues I’ve discussed here, than the politics of free speech and memorialization on campus, and the contributions these students have made to our national consciousness.

And that’s why we owe these students at Princeton a debt. Universities are supposed to be educational institutions: Their first educational constituency is their students, of course, but their second is the nation. Most of us are fairly ignorant about how central race and racism were to Wilson’s politics. By forcing this question, not only on Princeton’s campus but throughout the country, Princeton’s students are actually doing the job that Princeton itself is supposed to be doing: they’re educating all of us.

…

Too often in our debates about freedom of speech, we assume that it already exists and that it is campus activists, particularly over questions of race, who threaten it. But what Princeton’s students have shown is that, before they came along, there was in fact precious little speech about figures like Wilson, and what speech there was, was mostly bland PR for tourists and prospective students. Even more important, Princeton’s students have shown us that it is precisely the kinds of actions they have taken — which are uncivil, frequently illegal and always unruly — that produce speech. Not just yelling and shouting, but also informed, deliberative, reasoned speech.

 

…

Besides, there’s any number of ways to take Wilson’s name off a campus building — without erasing the past. Princeton could put up a plaque that says, “This building was once named after Woodrow Wilson in honor of his achievements as president of Princeton, governor of New Jersey and president of the United States. In 2015, after lengthy campus discussions of Wilson’s racial policies — including his decision to segregate the federal bureaucracy — the university decided to remove his name from this building and to rename it the W.E.B. DuBois School of Public and International Affairs, in honor of Wilson’s most formidable critic on matters of race.”

And then we could have another debate: about how DuBois would have been appalled to see his name adorn a building on a campus where dining hall workers, many of whom are black (it’s telling that the demographic on campus that has the highest percentage of African Americans is “all other staff”), make less than a living wage if they are parents and are often treated as if they were servants.

The Moloch of National Security

Of all the smart recommendations Steve Walt makes in his post, “Don’t Give ISIS What It Wants,” this is the most important:

No. 2: Accept that 100 percent security is not possible.

As I’ve written before, of all the ideological Molochs that modernity has spawned—communism, fascism, liberalism, conservatism, whatever—none is as potent and enduring, none demands so much sacrifice, as the idea of security. If we’re going to get past the permanent state of emergency we seem to be in, we have to accept that 100% security is not possible. Risk is part of life. While the siren call of safety has an irresistible lure—though we should always remember that not everyone’s safety has the same lure to policymakers; security is a selective ideal, selectively implemented—we need to learn how to resist it. By which I mean we need to learn how to think politically about security, not simply give into its irrepressible demands, but meditate upon how, like all goods, it should be distributed; how much of it we need; who should pay for it, and so on.

National security is as political as Social Security; let’s think and act accordingly.

Here, if you’re interested, are just a few of the more analytical/theoretical articles I’ve written on security over the years

“Protocols of Machismo“

“Language and Violence“

“Was he? Had he?“

“Yours, Mine, But Not Ours“

 

 

 

Black Alumni at Yale Weigh In With Major List of Demands

Among the more dispiriting responses to the wave of protests around racism on campus is the claim that this unrest, particularly at Yale, is the work of privileged and pampered campus crybabies. Now I cede to no one in my contempt for Yale. But I think that criticism is unfair. As I’ve pointed out a number of times, if we want to turn every conflict over social justice into the Oppression Olympics, where you can’t talk about one case of injustice until you’ve talked about every other case of worse injustice, no one in the United States is going to deserve anything. You can always find someone who is worse off and more deserving; by that definition, most people around the globe are privileged. I suppose I’m also sensitive to this charge because I heard it so often when we were organizing at Yale: you’re at Yale, you’re privileged, you don’t need a union. I hate to see students of color subjected to the same dismissive brushoff.

All the more reason that people should pay attention to this list of demands just released by a group of black alumni from Yale. Contrary to a lot of the reporting on the problems at Yale, it focuses on the real material factors that make that institution so inhospitable to people of color. The phrase “structural racism” is often tossed around without much definition; these proposals give definition and substance to it.

The proposals are all important, but four in particular deserve emphasis.

Here’s the first:

Implement and complete the $50 million diversity initiative within three years with student and alumni of color oversight. The current plan further casualizes academic labor by proposing to hire “as many as ten visiting professors each year,” funneling people of color into temporary, unstable positions and in so doing undermining the stated commitment to diversity. Instead, Yale should hire permanent tenured and tenure-track faculty of color across the University in areas that contribute to interdisciplinary understandings of racial inequality and take real measures, with faculty input, to retain professors currently in their employ.

I hadn’t realized that so much of Yale’s diversity initiative was dedicated to contingent positions. This proposal refocuses us on where we need to pay attention: the tenure-stream.

Here are the second and third:

As per the calls of the Black and Latino caucus of the New Haven Board of Alders, prioritize New Haven residents, especially those from Black and Latino neighborhoods, in hiring for all University staff positions. Create real measures for advancement in these positions rather than the racialized job compression and segregation that exists currently.

Retain the stable, union jobs that currently exist in order to preserve the rights of women of color at Yale who are concentrated in clinical positions.

Discussions around campus racism too often leave out university staff. Campuses aren’t just students and faculty; they’re also workers. I’m really glad this one brings those workers—and unions—back into the conversation. Yale is New Haven’s largest employer. Its hiring and promotion decisions have a huge effect on people of color in that city.

Here’s the last:

In recognition of the fact that precarity in graduate teaching and research disproportionately impacts people of color, recognize the Graduate Employees and Student’s Organization (GESO)—who have demonstrated a majority of graduate student support—and negotiate a contract in good faith for graduate teaching assistants and researchers.

For obvious reasons. But one of them is that some of the signatories to the statement include friends and comrades from GESO days like Michelle Stephens, Prudence Cumberbatch (who now teaches with me at Brooklyn College), Cynthia Young, Lori Brooks, and Leigh Raiford.

I hope these demands move us beyond the free speech v. racism debate, and get us talking about institutional reforms that could have a measurable effect on people’s lives at Yale, New Haven, and beyond.

 

 

 

A Prayer For Peace

Every week Jews recite this prayer for peace, which is drawn from various biblical passages, in shul. This is just part of it:

May we see the day when war and bloodshed cease,

when a great peace will embrace the whole world.

Then nation will not threaten nation,

and mankind will not again know war.

For all who live on earth shall realize

we have not come into being to hate or to destroy.

We have come into being

to praise, to labor and to love.

This week more than ever.

How to Honor the Settlement Between UIUC and Steven Salaita

There’s a lot of Friday morning quarterbacking going on about whether Steven Salaita should have accepted his settlement or not. I can’t tell you how distasteful I find this conversation: people who never bore the sacrifices Steven has borne—and who, as far as I can tell, would never bear those sacrifices—are now lecturing him to play the part of the sacrificial lamb, to essentially do the work that they have not done so that they can continue not doing the work that they have not done. Such calls strain the bounds of political decency.

I was going to issue a pissy edict, something along the lines of: Before you criticize Steven Salaita for not being the martyr you want him to be, get yourself on a search committee—if you’re an academic, particularly an academic in a literature department—and hire him. You’ll kill two birds with one stone: maybe you’ll get him a job, and if you do, you’ll get to experience a small portion of the hurricane that he and has family (and the American Indian Studies Department at UIUC) have suffered through this past year.

But that’s just me being emotional.

Luckily, Lida Maxwell, a political theorist at Trinity who always seems to have the right words for the right occasion, had this to say on my Facebook wall:

When Dreyfus was granted a pardon by the French President in 1899, he had to admit guilt in order to be set free. Many Dreyfusards criticized him, but Emile Zola wrote in an open letter to Alfred’s wife, Lucie, “No matter how much I as a citizen may be in mourning, no matter how much painful indignation, how much rebellion and anxiety just souls may continue to feel, I share with you this exquisite, tearful moment when you hold the resurrected man in your arms. He has been raised from the dead! He has emerged from the tomb, live and free. Surely this is a great day, a day of victory and celebration.” In other words, we should be upset as citizens about a wrong that has not been fully righted, but we should also recognize that one individual (or one family) alone should not bear the burden of the fact that the wrong has not been righted.

Perfect.

UIUC Reaches Settlement with Steven Salaita

Steven Salaita and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have reached a settlement. According to a press release from the Center for Constitutional Rights, which helped represent Steven, Salaita will receive $875,000 from UIUC. According to this press report, he’ll receive $600,000 plus legal fees. Perhaps the $275,000 discrepancy is for the legal fees. I don’t know. The UIUC has already spent $1.3 million in its own defense. All told, this effort to silence an outspoken critic of Israel has cost the university nearly two and half million dollars.

Many of us had hoped that a settlement would include Steven getting his job back. For his sake and ours: to vindicate principles we all hold dear. I would be less than honest if I didn’t say I was disappointed.

But while this was a major battle for principle, there was a person at the heart of that battle: Steven. Since he first got the news of his firing, he and his family have been through hell. A protracted legal battle would invariably have been long and difficult, its outcome uncertain. It’s all well and good for those of us on the sidelines to say he should keep fighting—and he himself might have wanted to do so—but Steven has a family to support and a life to live. If this settlement helps him do that, I stand with him. Firmly. Throughout this fight, he has had my firm support, respect, admiration, and affection; now that it is over, he has all those things even more.

I know many of you will wonder about the fate of the boycott: though different statements voiced the demand differently, many statements had insisted that the boycott would continue till Steven was reinstated. It’s difficult now to know how to proceed. Because there was never a formal body that called for the boycott, there isn’t a formal body to call it off. So I’m only going to speak for myself. The boycott, I think, has been tremendously successful in raising awareness, in turning what might have been a backdoor, behind-the-scenes legal case into a full-on battle for free speech in the 21st century; certainly the university was always very mindful of it and its effects. I’m proud of that. But I don’t see a point in continuing a fight when its chief protagonist has resolved it. I know the boycott has been tremendously hard on many departments at UIUC, particularly those departments that were most in support of Steven. For all these reasons, I see no reason to continue it. Others may reach different conclusions. I respect their decisions.

As I was finishing up this post, Steven responded to an email I had sent him with the following:

We fought hard.  I tried my very best to represent those invested in the issue with dignity and decency.  And I hope this sort of thing never happens to anybody else.

I would say that Steven did more than try his very best to represent those invested in the issue with dignity and decency. He actually did represent those invested in the issue with dignity and decency. And while I don’t have a crystal ball, I’d be surprised if any university ever tried to pull this kind of stunt again.

UPDATE: According to this press report, the $275,000 is for legal fees.

What in God’s Name is the Head of PEN Talking About?

I find this statement in a New York Times oped, coming from Suzanne Nossel, the head of PEN America, to be absolutely stunning:

SOME of the most potent threats to free speech these days come not from our government or corporations, but from our citizenry.

Anyone who can write a sentence like this simply doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Which is fine, but not fine when the person is the head of an organization dedicated to freedom of expression.

By “our citizenry,” Nossel is referring to the recent round of free speech wars on college campuses. Now when these issues of free speech arise on campus, you usually see an explosion of conversation about it: on the campus itself, and in the media. Far from dampening down discussion, the controversy over free speech on campus actually ignites discussion. Everyone has an opinion, everyone voices it.

And while I wouldn’t diminish the challenges to free speech that these controversies pose, the notion that that they are far more common and threatening than what governments or corporations do is risible. Though given that Nossel is a former State Department flak, perhaps understandable. She is after all someone who has said:

To advance from a nuanced dissent to a compelling vision, progressive policymakers should turn to the great mainstay of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy: liberal internationalism…should offer assertive leadership — diplomatic, economic, and not least, military — to advance a broad array of goals.

When there are not just threats but actual abridgments of speech at the workplace—Nossel says “corporations,” referring I guess to firms’ financial lock on the political process, but as I’ve argued many times, it’s in their capacity as employers that firms really do damage to free speech—there is no such explosion as there are on college campuses. Partially because people like Nossel and the media are completely uninterested in the topic, even when the workplace in question is a university: if Nossel wrote an oped in the New York Times when Columbia prohibited its workers from speaking Spanish, I must have missed it.

But more important, there’s no explosion because abridgments of speech at work are so lethally effective. Workers are silenced, that is the end of the story. We never hear about it.

At one point in her oped Nossel does give a nod to the status of speech in the workplace. Here’s what she says:

Who would trade their [universities’ and colleges’] free-range spirit for the dreary sameness of a corporate office, with its federally sanctioned posters on what constitutes unlawful discrimination?

That’s where Nossel sees the threat to freedom of speech at work: in the “dreary sameness” roused by government efforts to inform workers of their rights against discrimination. There’s a suspicion on the left that freedom of speech is little more than a rationalization for racism or indifference to racism. I try to fight that suspicion all the time. But when the head of PEN America writes sentences like these, it makes that job infinitely harder.

Whatever one thinks about the current controversy over free speech at Yale and the University of Missouri, if the head of PEN America is going to leverage her pen on behalf of freedom of speech on the pages of the New York Times, she would well do to consider where the real threats to such speech lie.

Belated and Inadequate: My Thoughts on Carl Schorske

When Carl Schorske died two months ago, I wanted to write something more thoughtful and considered than the quick Facebook post or tweet. His work had meant too much to me. But when I started to re-read Fin-de-Siècle Vienna in preparation, I realized I wasn’t up for it. The book is just too symphonic; it’s like a George Eliot novel. Nothing I wrote seemed sufficient. So I did the only thing I could do: I posted a screen shot on Facebook of the opening paragraphs of the book.

Tonight I was looking for something in my blog, and I found this post from two years ago. It’s a reply to a wave of criticism I received in response to an article I wrote in The Nation on Nietzsche and Hayek. In the reply, I say some things about Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. Nothing fancy, but it occurred to me: the greatest honor we pay to a writer is to use his writings. It’s in the doing of the work, the carrying out of the task, that we pay our respects. So here I pay mine:

I wrote the piece [on Nietzsche and Hayek] mainly in pursuit of an idea coming out of my encounter with Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. Situating the rise of modernism in the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, this classic study hears the drumbeat of Viennese politics—a flailing ancien régime, a bourgeoisie struggling to extract a liberal order from “the feudals,” and a vicious street fight of right and left— in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Klimt’s Athena portraits, and other touchstones of high culture.

Schorske’s book spawned an entire literature devoted to the Viennese origins of logical positivism, psychoanalysis, atonal music, and more. Yet there has always been a conspicuous absence in that literature: the Austrian School of economics. Even though the Austrian School was forged in the same Schorskean crucible of a regnant aristocracy, weak liberalism, and anti-socialism, even though the Austrian economists offer an appreciation of the subjective, non-rational, and unconscious elements of life rivaling that of Freud, Klimt, and Kokoschka, the Austrians make no appearance in Schorskean histories of Vienna and Schorske’s Vienna makes no appearance in studies of the Austrians. It’s as if there is a tacit vow of silence among two sets of scholars: historians and leftists who do not want to concede any cultural status or philosophical depth to (in their view) vulgarians of the market like Mises and Hayek, and libertarians and economists who do not want to see their inspirations tainted by the politics of Vienna.

Strangely, two weeks before Schorske died, I was asked in an interview by the historian Andrew Hartman what were my touchstones in intellectual history. I mentioned three; one of them was Fin-de-Siècle Vienna.

Another book that comes to mind is Carl E. Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, which introduced me to the notion of cultural texts as sublimations of political conflicts. Especially in his chapter on Freud, where Schorske shows how psychoanalysis registers, in a new vocabulary of the self, the larger battles of Viennese and Habsburg politics. In the same way that Nietzsche retells the founding story of social contract theory as an internal drama of the mind’s development, so does Schorske read the Oedipus Complex as a psychic transposition of the political story of Oedipus Rex. From Schorske, I developed an interest in how cultural forms and texts—particularly, economics—are condensations or sublimations of political life or forgotten political vocabularies.

At a later point, I’d like to say more, especially about this idea of condensation and sublimation. Until then, this will have to do.

 

Liberalism = Conservatism + Time

Hillary Clinton in 2010 on the effects of racist colonialism on Africa:

For goodness sakes, this is the 21st century. We’ve got to get over what happened 50, 100, 200 years ago and let’s make money for everybody. That’s the best way to try to create some new energy and some new growth in Africa.

Antonin Scalia in 1993 on the effects of racist segregation on America:

At some time, we must acknowledge that it has become absurd to assume, without any further proof, that violations of the Constitution dating from the days when Lyndon Johnson was President, or earlier, continue to have an appreciable effect upon current operation of schools. We are close to that time.

I was going to leave the comparison there. But there’s an even more unsavory precedent: The Civil Rights Cases of 1883, which helped legitimate the racist backlash of Jim Crow. In that case, decided less than 20 years after the abolition of slavery, Justice Bradley argued that discrimination in places of public accommodation were the private acts of white citizens having nothing to do with the institution of slavery. They thus could not be prohibited by the state.

After giving to these questions all the consideration which their importance demands, we are forced to the conclusion that such an act of refusal has nothing to do with slavery or involuntary servitude…It would be running the slavery argument into the ground to make it apply to every act of discrimination which a person may see fit to make as to the guests he will entertain, or as to the people he will take into his coach or cab or car, or admit to his concert or theatre, or deal with other matters of intercourse or business….

When a man has emerged from slavery, and, by the aid of beneficent legislation, has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws,…

After all, what’s 250 years of chattel slavery when you’ve had 18 years of freedom? Or 500 years of colonialism next to 50 years of independence? Get over it!

 

A Patience With Your Own Crap: Philip Roth on Writing

David Remnick: Is there a sense of mastery at some point that you might not have had at 40?—

Philip Roth: There’s patience.

Remnick:—What did age give you?—

Roth: Patience.

Remnick:—What did experience give you?

Roth: Patience. That is, the patience to outlast your frustration. The confidence that if you just stay with it you’ll master it, you know? But that doesn’t mean tomorrow necessarily but that I think it gives you confidence in your instincts….You don’t feel like such a gambler, such a risk taker, in laying down the first ten or twenty or fifty pages. So I guess age and experience give you patience, confidence. Though the confidence can be shattered at the end of a first draft. Probably any work where you start with nothing on a page and you have to fill the page is accompanied by a lot of anxiety and a lot of fear. Fear that simply you can’t do it. And frustration as you’re doing it because what comes is very crude. But over the years I think what you develop is a tolerance for your very crudeness. And patience, patience with your own crap, really. And a kind of belief in your crap, which is: just stay with your crap and it’ll get better if you just stay with it. And then come back every day and keep going.